


the wheel of the fates

by gendernoncompliant



Series: no place in the stars [2]
Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV Second Person, Self-Reflection, parental neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26739049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendernoncompliant/pseuds/gendernoncompliant
Summary: Your mother’s goodbye doesn’t even mention you. You wonder if you were born at all—or if you were, instead, spun upon the wheel of the Fates to be woven into a story that was never yours to begin with.
Relationships: Megaera/Zagreus (Hades Video Game), Thanatos/Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Series: no place in the stars [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2013697
Comments: 16
Kudos: 274





	the wheel of the fates

**Author's Note:**

> I don't think there's much in the way of spoilers, here. I've beaten the boss fight with Hades once, and I'm midway through trying to romance Than and Meg, but for the most part the fic pulls on relatively early game information and my own headcanons.
> 
> **I've included this in a series of Zagreus character studies, however it functions entirely stand-alone and it's not necessary to read the rest of the series to understand what's happening <3

Truth is, you’re frightened of your father.

You put on a good show, face every beast in his employ without flinching. When they strike you down, you look him in the eye as you drag yourself up from the Styx.

But the arm of his influence reaches well beyond the walls of the House where you were raised. No corner of the Underworld escapes his touch. None would dare defy him.

None save you, as you make your bid for the surface again and again and again.

(You have to find her. She’s proof there is an escape from him.)

“She abandoned you, Zag,” Than reminds you. Not kind, exactly, but as close to gentle as gods of death and ex-lovers are wont to come. “Your family is here.”

He met her, your mother.

You don’t ask him all the questions that beat against the back of your teeth. You’re afraid of their answers. You are afraid to measure her against the myth you’ve written in your own mind. You escape for her because it is a calling higher than yourself. Because _she_ is a calling higher than yourself.

You can’t risk losing that.

So, you defy your father in her name. And you find that there are more dissenters in his court than he would have led you to believe. Everyone offers their assistance in quiet, clandestine ways—secret you treasures and power and tricks you might wield against him.

Even Than comes around eventually—although a part of him still resents you for ever wanting to leave.

You were boys together, once.

(Funny, to imagine a pair of gods as mere boys. Of course, you are not the god you once thought. Godling, Aphrodite calls you. Nephew, say Poseidon and Zeus. Cousin and kin. They all promise a future upon Mount Olympus, but what good is that future to you? You never belonged amongst the gods. You are only now finding out just how much.)

You’re not sure how long ago you and Than were boys together. Time means nothing in the Underworld, and it means even less to you. You have died a thousand deaths since you last laid your head upon your pillow. You will die a thousand more before you lay it there again.

But once, the two of you were children, still yet unburdened by the weight of destiny and expectation. You had not yet borne the battle wounds of a hundred lifetimes. He had not yet committed any souls to the depths. But he wore the future on his shoulders like a shroud—always far too serious, far too quiet, far too contemplative.

Thanatos belongs in this place. You hate yourself for thinking it; no one should belong to this pit—to Tartarus’s eerie and unending cold, Asphodel’s unforgiving heat, or Elysium’s empty promises. And the House—the House was a dim and lonely place long before you decided to leave it. All your love for Nyx, for Achilles, for Dusa and Meg and Hypnos and Cerberus, could not keep you contented inside of it.

Than has never wanted a life beyond these halls. Or if he has, he squashed the impulse. But you cannot carve yourself into the right shape of cog for this machine. Everything always grates.

Than was born to wield his scythe. He grew into it slowly. And you—what have you grown into?

Besides a disappointment.

(The Underworld doesn’t suit you, Godling. Set fire to those feet and flee.)

Your mother’s goodbye doesn’t even mention you.

You wonder if you were born at all—or if you were, instead, spun upon the wheel of the Fates to be woven into a story that was never yours to begin with.

Perhaps you were a fool to ever think you could leave this place. Perhaps all your leaving serves only as set dressing in another man’s legend. Heroes, after all, are not born beneath.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be, Zagreus,” Meg tells you as she pockets the bottle of nectar you smuggled in from the wastes. She struggles to look you in the eye when the two of you aren’t locked in combat on the battlefield or tangled together in your bed. She puts a purposeful distance between you—wider than the river Lethe and twice as deep.

You’ve killed one another dozens of times but when last she ran you through, she sent you off to the Styx with an apology.

And a kiss.

And yet, still, she mans her station: ever loyal to the House of Hades. Ever shackled by the threat of your father. She’s resigned herself to it. Once, so too had you.

She rests her hand against the flask on her hip. “You’re living in a fantasy,” she tells you—less a reprimand than an exhausted plea. Staring down at the floor, she grits her teeth. “When he’s angry, we all suffer.”

“Then why are you letting me win?” you whisper, voice pitched low so the nosy shades haunting the lounge can’t hear.

“How dare you?” She hisses back. Recoiling, she drops the bottle of nectar back into your hands. “Keep your trinkets. And keep away from me.”

It’s always like this with Meg—a push and pull you never got the hang of. Even when you win, you lose.

(You repeated once, in jest, a platitude you’d heard the shades whispering whilst they discussed their various untimely ends—that the line between hate and love is razor thin. Achilles sat you down, put a heavy hand on your shoulder, and shook his head.

“No, lad,” he’d told you. “Love looks nothing like hate. Anyone who’d tell you so doesn’t love you. Do you understand?”

At the time, you were young and wild and unbothered by concepts so abstract and lofty as love. You thought you knew love just fine—as well as you ever wanted to know it. You’d squirmed out of the conversation with a scoff and laugh and a halfhearted promise to keep it in mind.

But you did remember it.

Of course, Than doesn’t look at you like he hates you. You can’t even seem to make Meg hate you, although the both of you have certainly tried.

Hate stems from your father.

Belatedly—years and years after the fact, you wonder if that’s what Achilles was trying to tell you all along.)

Perhaps it is foolish to want more for yourself when you’re already seated at a god’s table. Perhaps you are exactly as arrogant, as selfish, as willful as your father says you are. Perhaps the world above is ugly and pointless just how Thanatos promises.

The surface is—

Cold.

Gods, it’s cold.

A different kind of cold than the world below. A biting, ravenous, _living_ cold. Not even your own internal fire can keep it from your bones.

You stand for the first time against your father. (It will not be the last time. It will not be the second to last or the third or the fourth.) Some part of you did not believe it would come to this—that for all Hades’s talk, he would not lift a blade against his own son.

The fact that he would hurts more than the killing blow. You’re granted one last, long moment in the snow before the Styx rises up to claim you. His face looms over you, blotting out the moon.

You think you might have liked to see the moon.

But there is no sky in the House of Hades.

And there is no place in the stars for you.


End file.
